Instances That Neither Present Nor Presume Participant Identities

Martin & Rose (2007: 162):

Usually, presenting reference is used when we first mention a person, and presuming reference is used for second or subsequent mentions. But in English this doesn’t always hold. For example, what looks like presenting reference is used to describe Helena’s first love, even after we know who he is:

he was an Englishman

Similarly her second love is described indefinitely after he is introduced:

(He was) Not quite my first love, but (he was) an exceptional person.

Helena even describes herself as a farm girl, after presuming her own identity twice with my:

My story begins in my late teenage years as a farm girl …

The reason for these apparent anomalies is that these indefinite expressions are being used to describe or classify people, not to identify them. These kinds of expressions are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. They include classifying figures:

He was an Englishman
It was only a means to the truth

And classifying roles:

She lived as a farm girl.
He worked as a policeman.

Since they don’t actually identify people, we will set these expressions aside here as far as identification is concerned.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, from the perspective of SFL Theory, presenting reference is non-specific deixis misunderstood as reference. The claim here is that the first mention of a person in a text is usually as a non-specific nominal group — that is, one featuring any the determiners a, an, one, some(one), any(one). This absurd claim is falsified, in the authors' own terms, by every text in which the first mention of the speaker is I and the first mention of anyone else is by their name, since both are presuming rather than presenting.

[2] To be clear, the non-specific determiner an does not reference a recoverable identity. The reference item in this instance is he, which refers anaphorically to a young man in his twenties, who is ascribed the Attribute an Englishman by means of the attributive clause in which he serves as Carrier.

[3] Again, the non-specific determiner an does not reference a recoverable identity. The "indefinite description" is the non-specific nominal group an exceptional person that realises the participant; that is, this is reference in the sense of ideational denotation, not textual meaning.

[4] To be clear, the non-specific determiner a does not reference a recoverable identity. The "description of her" as a farm girl construes the speaker in terms of Rôle: guise; that is, this is reference in the sense of ideational denotation, not textual meaning.

[5] To be clear, "the reason for these apparent anomalies" confuses the purported textual function of non-specific nominal groups (reference) with their experiential function (Attribute, Rôle) in clause structure. In this sense, the confusion is one of metafunction.

However, this metafunctional confusion is further complicated by the fact that non-specific nominal groups do not reference in the textual sense, since they do not include a reference item that presumes a recoverable identity. Non-specific nominal groups only reference in the sense of ideational denotation, that is: in the sense of realising a participant.

That is to say, from the perspective of SFL Theory, the confusion here is between

• the experiential function of a non-specific nominal group in realising a clause participant, and
• the experiential function of a non-specific nominal group in a structural configuration.